One Wednesday afternoon Dash’s teacher, Donna Andrews, saw me waiting for him on the front steps of the school and asked me into the classroom to talk. She cared a great deal about all her pupils and was well-loved by parents and students alike. She looked out for Dash and had flagged his troubles early on. She had been a teacher for a long time and knew intuitively which children had supportive home lives and which didn’t. She knew within weeks of Dash’s beginning Grade Seven that no one got him up and ready for school and no one helped him with his homework. As the year progressed and Dash slipped behind, she had tried to be there for him. She organized a morning tutor to help Dash work, and she called the house those mornings to make sure he was awake and on his way to school. Still, Dash did very little. He rarely handed in assignments and, when he did, the work was dreadful. His report cards showed consistently low marks. He was a long way behind the class, and there were only a couple of months until the end of the school year and the change and tumult of high school. Donna told me Dash might not make it in high school. She believed that, if he went there as emotionally and academically unprepared as he was, he would drop out within a month. Dash had shut down. He was standoffish and evasive. He gave monosyllabic answers when asked questions. Sometimes he couldn’t sit still and disrupted the other students so much that Donna had to isolate him in the classroom. Sometimes he was sent out of the room altogether. Dash told Donna that he went to bed “very late” every night but still couldn’t sleep. He mumbled and slurred his words at school, and the vice-principal, Carol Andison, suspected him of going home at lunchtimes and getting drunk. Donna thought it more likely that Dash was just mimicking his father. He had done it all his life.
Donna had begun calling Peter every week, sometimes two or three times, with grave concerns. Donna told me that Carol Andison had begun calling, too, but it was neither effective nor pleasant. Peter was enraged. “You fucking people, just let him be. Haven’t you ever had a bad year?” But Dash wasn’t just having a bad year. He was having the “bad life” he had cried about in my arms when he was eight years old. “You people lay off, or I’ll pull him out of the school,” Peter told Carol.
When Donna told me what Peter had said, my heart seized. If he’d said the same thing to Dash, it would have terrified him. His school was his support network and the only link he had to a caring community. Dash’s charisma had endeared him to his teachers long after he became a difficult pupil. He felt important at school, because he was a natural leader and still had good friends. He had a teacher, a vice-principal, and a principal all reaching out to him and trying to help and understand him. It was clear to the teachers that Dash wasn’t fine, and they looked to his father to see why. Why wouldn’t Peter involve himself in his child’s life? He wore Vicks VapoRub on his clothes, which Donna believed was to disguise the smell of alcohol. She had heard stories from other parents about the state of Dash’s household. She believed that Dash parented his father.
Donna paused after telling me all this. She looked at me hard. I had known for so long that Dash was in trouble, but at that instant, in that second between knowing and not knowing, I wanted desperately for her to say that everything was going to be fine, that Dash was a happy little daydreamer, and that my worries weren’t real. What she said was: “We believe Dash is depressed. Pam, he might be suicidal.”
Dash’s situation had become urgent enough for Donna, Carol, and Murray Stephenson, the principal, to consider something radical. They thought about calling child services, but didn’t have any confidence in the outcome. That was a crapshoot, too, and might make everything worse. They had used the phrases “depressed,” “psychiatric problems,” and “potential suicide,” and they couldn’t stand aside and watch a rapidly worsening situation. Still, they were teachers, not social workers, and it took a lot for them to stand up. Out of my conversation with Donna came a new forum: court. They offered me their standing as Dash’s educators. They agreed to tell Justice Brenner what they knew. Despite his pronouncement that our custody issues could never go before the court again, I was sure that Dash’s deterioration at school would be so alarming to Justice Brenner that it would finally force his hand to do something to help Dash.
Jamie gave Peter notice of the hearing, as he was obliged to, but didn’t tell him we had the teachers coming. Peter would have got a restraining order, called the school board, threatened to sue, or raised a posse. He would intimidate the teachers — he had a reputation at the school for doing just that — and I couldn’t risk scaring the teachers off. We deceived Peter and his lawyer, but I was beyond caring. Peter had had enough chances to help our son. The courts had only ever given me silk-thread connections to Dash, but the teachers gave me another chance. When I gathered them up and went to court, my back was straighter and my shoulders squarer than they had been in months. After all my years of trying to convince my lawyers, our judges, and Dr. Elterman, at last people outside my sphere of influence were saying that Dash was in a dangerous and neglectful environment. Now that I wasn’t in this alone any more, neither was Dash. I wanted him in my home. I wanted an independent psychological and educational assessment to tell us what we were dealing with and the authority to get Dash the counselling and academic help he needed. The joint guardianship I had been given at the 1996 trial had amounted to nothing precisely because it was joint — I still had to get Peter’s permission to do anything and Peter never gave it. I needed more. So I was asking for a psycho-educational assessment and interim custody of Dash (pending the outcome of the assessment). I wasn’t asking for a complete custody reversal. I wanted to start the ball rolling without making anyone nervous.
The hearing was set for April 24, 1997. Peter had been served, and knew the date and time, but didn’t show up in court, knowing that judges almost never allow ex parte hearings or decide matters of any importance without the other party being present in the courtroom. We begged Justice Brenner to listen to the teachers’ evidence anyway. It had been difficult enough getting them to go to court in the first place. Were the rules of procedure more important than a child? Brenner dithered. Then sighed. And called Donna Andrews to the stand.
“Ha, ha, ha, ha!” Donna threw her head back and laughed maniacally from the witness box. “Do people do this very often? Is this normal behaviour?” The crazed laughter that Donna recreated on the stand was one of Dash’s bizarre new behaviours: roaring out loud at totally inappropriate times. It really bothered her; there was madness in it. It bothered her as much as his chronic disruptiveness and day-long fidgeting. The way he mumbled, stumbled, and fell off chairs bothered her, too. Dash “walked crooked” and bumped into things, pretended he couldn’t do basic tasks and couldn’t give Donna a straight answer or look her in the eye. Dash was unmotivated and very, very low. A letter from the school months earlier had spelled out Dash’s lack of progress: he had now fallen to two and a half years below his grade level in reading. The only math he completed was done with a tutor. On twelve assignments, Dash got zero on four, missed two altogether, and scored badly on three others. In language arts he’d handed in nothing. His home reading had not been completed or signed. In social studies, he had done none of the assignments given out in the previous weeks. Donna had asked the rest of the class to help Dash on a communal basis, and they did. The other kids encouraged him, making up “a little game with him to encourage him to work.” “Come on Dash,” they would say, “this one’s easy. Let’s do this one together.” It did help, but not enough.
Donna found it strange that she knew almost nothing about Dash, and wondered why he was secretive and defensive. “Dash never, ever, talks about his father,” she said. “He never talks about his mother. He does not give any information about his home life at all. I know a great deal about all the students in my class, but not Dash.” She said that, when she became concerned enough to “do a bit of prying” during a talk with Dash, she quickly received an unpleasant phone call from Peter, reprimanding her “for butting into somethi
ng that was not my business.” Peter had made it clear that I was not to be involved in any way. Donna told Justice Brenner she had met with me at a parent-teacher night and, after mentioning it to Dash, she received — freakishly quickly — a phone call from Peter, despite the joint-guardianship order now in the school’s files. “What do you mean she was there? How did she know to come? To come to parent night? She showed up?” he had said, aghast that I had been to the school, and furious that Donna had spoken with me.
Donna had never been so involved with a student as she was with Dash. She had phoned Peter twenty-five or thirty times to talk about Dash, for truancy, for missing homework, for late attendance, poor work, absent work, bad behaviour, general concerns. Peter told her what he told everyone: that “their” problems were my fault. “The trial his mother forced me into,” he said, had devastated his law practice and he was busy rebuilding it. He said Dash was fine and just needed to be left alone.
“I would always let Peter talk,” Donna told Justice Brenner, but “basically I’d end up saying, ‘Well, Peter, I really don’t think you’re understanding what I’m trying to say, and I’m glad that you think that everything is fine and dandy, but what I’m telling you is what I see in the school. It’s not fine and dandy. Dash is not all right.’”
When Carol Andison, the vice-principal, took the stand, she agreed that Peter was a big part of the problem. Just three weeks before the court hearing, Carol had called him to reschedule a meeting she and Donna had arranged with him to talk about Dash. “I said, ‘Peter, I’m just phoning to reschedule the meeting that you missed last week,’ and he said, ‘What’s this meeting about?’ I said, ‘Well, you know we’re quite concerned about Dash. We need to do some problem solving about what we’re going to do,’ and he immediately became incredibly abusive, just incredibly, swearing at me, telling me, you know, ‘You f’ing people don’t know what you’re doing,’ just screaming at me. I said, ‘Peter, I’m going to have to hang up. I don’t understand why you’re yelling at me. I’m just trying to schedule an appointment.’ And he said, ‘You’ll have to forgive my manner.’ I said, ‘Well, no, I don’t have to forgive your manner. I don’t want you swearing at me.’ Anyway, he did stop swearing, but he continued to scream at me, ‘Let this child be, just let him be. You don’t know anything about children.’ So I said, ‘Are you going to come to this meeting on Wednesday morning at 8:15 or not? Just give me a yes or a no.’ He said, ‘I’ll be there,’ and hung up on me. That was the end of it. And he never showed up.”
The principal, Murray Stephenson, told the judge that Dash’s behaviour had become so bad that he had been permanently removed from his French class. He started fights, but when he wasn’t raising hell, Dash was “emotionally withdrawn.” He had begun a strange new habit of lying down on the floor of the classroom like a corpse. Dash’s eyes were almost permanently downcast and he had an over-quiet, solemn demeanour. A year earlier Dash had been a “relatively happy boy,” Stephenson said, but he was no longer the same boy, and the rapidity and extent of the changes alarmed him. “I believe he needs some professional assistance — and what form that takes I don’t know, perhaps psychiatric help — but he needs a professional to guide him in a very different direction,” he said. Peter knew about Dash’s troubles in the finest detail but there had been little response: no alarmed phone calls, no offers to do whatever he could to help his son, no visiting the school to meet with the teachers.
Surely, I could step into that vacuum?
We asked Justice Brenner for an immediate decision. The timing of Dash’s transfer to my interim custody would be perfect: he was at a wilderness camp with his school on a small island off the Sunshine Coast. I could pick him up at the ferry on his return and take him straight to my home. I knew the plan would fail if we had to pick him up from his dad’s. If Peter got to him first, or if he was allowed to be at the house watching Dash pack, Dash wouldn’t be able to come with me. He wouldn’t be able to defy his father like that. Still Brenner wavered. Jesus Christ, will you just act? I thought. But he adjourned us for a week to wait for Peter to come and give his side of the argument.
In a brutal blow, which belied all Justice Brenner knew about our case, he ordered a copy of the teachers’ testimony to be sent to Peter so that he could prepare an answer to my claims. No! Don’t you dare send that transcript! my mind screamed. Dash will read it. You know he will. How many times can you hear Peter tell you Dash reads everything? That school is all Dash has. He will shut down there, too, if he thinks the teachers have aligned with me. Jamie leapt to his feet to argue. But it was done. Oh, my God, what have we done here? I panicked. Dash would read not concern and care but betrayal in what the teachers had said about him and his father. Donna Andrews was the only mother figure Dash now had, and he would dump her over this. She was interested in Dash and she cared for him; she helped him. He turned to her, too, and one day he might have even talked to her about his life, or asked for help, but I knew the transcript would change all that.
Sure enough, Dash it was given the transcript to read as soon as he got back from the camp, and he hated Donna intensely after that. He never forgave her for testifying, according to his friends. She was a traitor, just like his mother, and that brought the count of Dash’s healthy influences to exactly zero.
With sagging shoulders, Jamie and I went to court the following week. They sagged further when we saw Ken Westlake there with Peter. A senior criminal lawyer, he was, in his own words, one of Peter’s best friends. Five years before the teachers took the stand, Ken Westlake had written, in one of many affidavits, that Peter, “makes Dash feel good about himself.… Dash idolizes Peter. Peter is Dash’s hero. That is plain to see.… Peter is the best parent I have met.” Six months before the teachers took the stand he had breezed into one of the hearings after our second custody trial, adjusted his glasses, and declared to Justice Brenner that he was now twelve-year-old Dash’s lawyer.
Peter was outraged that we were in court again. He declared, “All of a sudden Mrs. Richardson has ingratiated herself with the teacher. That’s exactly the same thing that happened before, and it’s what’s upsetting Dash at school. He told me, ‘She’s just going to gather up evidence, Dad.’”
Don’t believe him, Brenner.
Yes, Dash “could probably shape up a little more in terms of doing his homework better,” Peter said, but he was a “happy, happy kid” who was just distracted. “He’s emotionally as sound as anybody can be. He just needs a little tuning up at school.” Don’t believe him. Listen to the teachers. This man can’t see past himself.
“Do I have to call another twenty witnesses to say he’s one of the happiest kids?” he asked. When Justice Brenner told him the teachers’ evidence had certainly been damning, Peter fell on an old standard line — no one understood Dash like he did. “The picture painted here is totally inaccurate,” he said, his air of bemusement crawling on my skin. “They don’t even know Dash.”
To my plea that Dash be ordered to undergo a psycho-educational assessment, Peter pulled Dash out of his hat. “I assure Your Lordship, Dash will not go to any psychological assessment,” Peter said, and those twelve words sunk us. Dash was thirteen now. Of course he wouldn’t be forced to go. Brenner shifted in his seat. Then just move him, I begged, as Jamie pleaded the same with the judge. Move him and I will work with him. We can get an assessment later. Just give us time to start his healing. Let him live with a healthy family. Let him learn what unconditional love feels like. Don’t let him lose this chance. Soon it will be too late. Give me custody. My family is committed to healing this damaged boy. I will hire any expert I have to, any counsellor, any tutor. I will take him anywhere. Please don’t make me watch him simply fade away.
But Peter knew his judge. He knew his system. He pulled out his reliable trump card: If you shift him, Judge, he will run away. Oh, he won’t. He won’t. Don’t believe them, I willed. But it sealed the deal. It was over. Brenner wasn’t going to w
rite another failed order. He wouldn’t be our super parent. Brenner said he wouldn’t go against what he had found at the trial — that Dash was happy at his dad’s home and wanted to stay there — and he wanted to talk personally with Dash before he decided what he should do. Oh, God, I put my head in my hands. This is a child who lies like a corpse on the floor of his classroom! How much more can he take? Though Jamie remained the gentleman he is, I saw a look of disgust cross his face and then a kind of sad, muted resignation. How can this be happening, after those teachers sat there and said “potential suicide”?
I wanted to finally, after all these years, dissolve into a fit of screaming. I wanted to be mad and bad and to express the disbelief, outrage, and hysteria that I had so often felt sitting in these rooms, to break down for having to colour within the lines all these years and get nowhere. For having sat in front of a dozen judges who did nothing. For having to think of every solution and hand it to them on a silver platter for them to ignore. I wanted to let it all out and show them all what battling this maniac for my son in this hamstrung institution had done to me. I was in court when I should have been home with Mimi, the boys, and the husband I was neglecting. Instead I was here again, banging my head against this brick wall. How many chances have you people had to do something that helps this child? I wanted to shout. “I’m not the only one Dash is slipping away from. Peter is going to lose him, too!” But as I watched Peter grandstand, Justice Brenner demur and murmur, and Jamie struggle, I said nothing. I stayed in my seat, my face reddening from the effort of keeping my frustration inside. Neither Jamie nor I did any shouting. I looked down at my palms, which showed red half-moons where my fingernails had pressed into them. I crumpled into my seat. Unable to vent my rage, I simply went numb.
A Kidnapped Mind Page 19